Why I Ditched My Friends On Digg

I’ll admit, I never was deeply involved in the Digg community. Sure, I enjoyed reading through the news and digging items I liked, but I didn’t have any goals to become a super-digger or form more intimate with relationships with any of the site’s users. Perhaps this lack of involvement made me a little naive. Because back when I started receiving friend requests on Digg, I accepted them. I actually believed that the people “friending” me on Digg were doing so because they saw that we shared similar interests and enjoyed digging the same stories. I was so wrong.

Thanks to this unfortunate choice I made in accepting these friendships, my shout box went from an inbox filled with interesting news from my friends to something that more closely resembles my Gmail spam folder than anything else.

My new “friends” were asking me to digg articles on personal finance, mortgages, celebrity gossip, gross pictures, girls posing in Playboy, and even shouts that aren’t even in a language I read! Did my profile not read “I digg tech news?” Why on earth do they think I would be interested in these stories?

The problem is that I had made a major mistake – I had “over-friended.” I essentially diluted my social graph with the spammiest of digg spammers and thanks to this, Digg lost value for me. I was missing good shouts from my friends. I missing the stories I really did want to read and help promote.

Obviously, I’ve realized my mistake, but it has been hard to find the time to clean up my large friend list. Today though, I’m finally biting the bullet and cleaning it up for good…and Facebook might be next.

If we used to be friends on Digg and all of a sudden we’re not, you’re welcome to re-send your request for me to evaluate – I may accidentally remove people I don’t mean to with my trigger-happy fingers. But be warned, I will evaluate it. If you don’t digg tech news, I’m just not that into you. Nothing personal, OK? But I want my old Digg back again and this is how I’m going to get it*.

That being said, I do want to fill my Digg friends list with people who also digg social media and tech news, too, so if that’s you, please friend me here: http://digg.com/users/sarahintampa.

* Note: Well that, and I’m using the new recommendation engine, too. It’s pretty sweet.